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Tactical Cloudlets: Research Focus (continued)

These are features of our baseline tactical
cloudlets implementation that contribute to increased survivability of tactical
mobile systems:

Capabilities as Services: Based on the
definition of a service in the context of service orientation, each VM provides
a self-contained capability and exposes a simple interface. Metadata in the
form of keywords is used by the cloudlet discovery protocol to inform mobile
devices of available capabilities.

Request-Response
Nature of Interactions Between Mobile Devices and Cloudlets: In the case
of computation offload, tactical cloudlets are best fit for applications based
on stateless, request-response, client/server interactions.This type of interaction enables easy
detection of failed communication between mobile devices and cloudlets as well
as minimal effect on mobile devices if computation needs to be restarted or
migrated.

Virtual machines as service containers: VMs can
be started and stopped asneeded based
on number of active users (which is typically bounded in edge environments
because group size is known) therefore supporting scalability and elasticity.

Cloudlet Management Component: A lightweight, web-based interface to the
Cloudlet Server and Service VM repository enables easy deployment and
redeployment of capabilities.

Standard packaging of Service VMs: Service VMs
can be easily installed from
the cloudlet manager, an
enterprise Service VM repository, a thumb drive, or the mobile device connected
via USB to the cloudlet.

Optimal
cloudlet selection: We extended the cloudlet discovery protocol to use metadata from the client app,
Service VM, and the cloudlet so that in the case that there is more than one
cloudlet in range, the mobile device can automatically select the cloudlet that
maximizes a pluggable utility function. This function can be based on cloudlet
load, signal strength, or any other parameter.

Manual
and automated cloudlet handoff: We are adding VM migration capabilities to enable
manual and automated handoff of data and computation between cloudlets that are
within range of each other. Manual
handoff would enable scenarios in which a user is migrating capabilities from a
fixed cloudlet to a mobile cloudlet to support field operations, as well as
reintegration back to the fixed cloudlet. Automated migration would enable load
balancing, similar to what is done in cloud data centers for resource
optimization.